A talent for translation
When he was drafted to translate the novels for
English readers, Murray had little idea what he was
getting himself into. Used to the journeyman nature
of his profession, Murray simply rolled up his
sleeves in his New Mexico home office and got to
work, translating sentence by sentence, refusing to
read ahead. “I believe my translation retains fresh-
ness if I find out what’s happening at the same pace
the reader will,” he says. “If it doesn’t surprise me, it’s
sure not going to surprise you.”
And so Murray, aided inestimably by his wife,
Tiina Nunnally, a multiple-award-winning transla-
tor, labored at the epic task before him, translating
all three books ( 2,463 pages, or 613,722 words) in 11
months, the time he would normally spend on a
single title. “I approached the translation of these
books as I did any other job,” he says, “but faster.”
He blew up the Swedish-language manuscript
on a photocopier to 133 percent on 11-by-17-inch
paper, cut the pages apart and got to work, line by
line. He worked split shifts between 6 a.m. and 2
a.m., seven days a week, “usually about five hours of
actual translating daily, with the goal of making the
translation sound as if the book had been written in
English,” Murray says.
The acclaimed translator, who says he is gratified
to “share in the success of these books after toiling in
the garden of translation for 35 years,” boasts a couple
of secret weapons in delivering excellence: The
Berkeley-born Murray returns to Denmark and
Sweden, where he studied and taught in the ’60s and
’70s, at least once a year with his wife to freshen up on
the culture and the language, and he regularly visits
blogs by Swedish teenagers—“extremely helpful in
tracking down meanings of the latest slang,” he reveals.
Murray worked diligently to discover and retain
Larsson’s own voice and adopted a work habit of his
friend and fellow translator the late Helen Lane,
who kept her foreign-language dictionaries across
the office from her computer. “She wanted it to be
an effort if she were tempted to look up a word,”
Murray says. “Otherwise the translation might ‘stink
of the dictionary.’ ”
MICHAEL LIONS TAR
Mission accomplished, according to Knopf’s
Bogaards, who believes “a good translator becomes
invisible. You read the book and don’t imagine for a
minute you are reading a work in translation,” he
says. “That’s certainly what Steve has done: delivered a work that Americans have devoured, most of
them unaware of his work with the text.”
From book to big screen
Like translator Murray, filmmaker Oplev was
drafted for the Millennium series long before the
books were dubbed “the hottest books on the planet”
by Entertainment Weekly. Indeed, Oplev, an award-
winning filmmaker with a résumé of controversial
and prestigious works, long resisted working in the
ghetto of Swedish thrillers, a genre largely relegated
to television in Scandinavia. “I’m not the kind of guy
that runs out to the airport and buys the latest thriller
each week,” he says. “So I had never heard of the
book, and I had no interest in making lowbrow
work. I was building a career as a serious filmmaker.”
When his neighbor finally convinced him to read
the book, which he did in a single, marathon sitting,
he realized how wrong he’d been to resist the calling.
“This is no standard Swedish thriller. This is outstand-
ing,” he says, remembering the moment of revelation.
“This is the Scandinavian Silence of the Lambs—a film
with the entertainment value of a Hollywood block-
buster and the edge of European cinema.”
Oplev negotiated for total artistic control of
Dragon Tattoo (due to time constraints, he helmed
only the first film in the trilogy), casting Noomi
Rapace as Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist as
Mikael Blomkvist, and carefully distilling a 560-
CONTINUED ON PAGE 32
Film director Niels Arden
Oplev (far left, with actor
Michael Nyqvist) brought the
story to the screen.
Knopf’s Paul Bogaards (center)
helped bring the book series
to a hungry American public.
Professional translator Steven
T. Murray (right) gave us
Larsson’s words.
The Costco Connection
Costco is carrying a deluxe hardcover set of Stieg
Larsson’s books, which includes a fourth book of
essays and interviews. Costco also carries the DVD of
the Scandinavian film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
